From Struggle to Service

By George Thompson

Life is like a rollercoaster—especially if you are a leader—and sometimes it’s hard to see where you are or where you’re going because of all the obstacles in your way. The chaotic experience of navigating life is especially true when it comes to money. Finances are often a good window into your personal and professional situation. This is why, throughout my career as a pastor and financial advisor, I have counseled people holistically, even if the initial problem they raise is financial.

Over the years, I have developed a diagnostic tool, the “Five Levels of Financial Being,” that facilitates conversations with clients about their financial situation and helps us formulate goals for future action. When we work through the tool, most discussions are not about numbers and bank accounts but about emotions, fears, aspirations and goals.

As you think about where you are as a leader and where you are going, you can use a similar rubric to help you develop your plans by expanding the tool’s scope to look at three dimensions: your personal growth, your organization or business growth, and your clients’ or constituents’ growth.

Imagine standing on a staircase, each step representing a different financial stage. You start at the bottom with struggling, where covering basic expenses feels like a Herculean task. Next comes steady, where you can pay your bills, but any surprise costs might send you tumbling back down. Solid is where you find stability, financial worries ease and competence in your field grows. Surplus, the next step, is the sweet spot where you make decisions based on desires and values instead of financial necessity. Finally, you reach service, where your focus is on purpose, and money becomes secondary.

As you reflect on that analogy, ask yourself this question regarding your leadership: Am I struggling, solid, steady, experiencing surplus or operating purely in service? Identify your current stage in the three dimensions I mentioned above to create strategic ways to advance.

In the first dimension, personal growth, you are on the struggling step if you constantly feel like you are drowning—like there is not enough of you to go around and not enough time to meet the minimum expectations of your role.

Your organization may be at this level if you are experiencing a contraction in profits, attendance or engagement. If you are not struggling with personal growth, or at the organizational level, your clients or constituents may struggle to get the results you want to help them achieve.

Personal growth on the steady step occurs when you know your need to keep growing as a leader, but you don’t have good habits or systems to ensure consistency. When you are faced with a crisis, it’s too easy for you to abandon your growth priorities to deal with short-term needs, and you end up sliding back to struggling.

On the organizational level steady is when you rely too much on past successes, and though things look good on the surface, as soon as you face headwinds in the marketplace or culture, you regress to struggling. Your clients and constituents have the same susceptibility to market or cultural forces if they resort to resting on their laurels.

When you are on the steady step, you have designed your life for consistent personal growth and prioritize individual learning as you budget your time and resources. You are calm, even when faced with a crisis, because you trust you can grow where necessary to meet any challenge.

If your organization is on the steady step, you have well-designed systems and processes that include resiliency considerations by anticipating and planning for adverse scenarios. Your clients and constituents are on the steady step when you have helped them develop realistic plans to meet their goals, and they are executing those plans.

Galatians 6:9 encourages us, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” This principle of reaping a harvest after we have sowed good seed for a while is how the steady step relates to the surplus step. In all three dimensions, you experience surplus after being steady for a while because your good seed begins to compound your results.

You become a more decisive leader when personal growth is embedded in your life, and you experience surplus because your effectiveness shrinks the time and resources it takes you to get the results you seek, so you have more to spare.

At the organizational level, the surplus step translates to solid profitability, growth and engagement; you can reinvest in more growth. And when your clients and constituents are on the surplus step, they have excess resources beyond what they need to reach their goals, so you can coach them about how to set their eyes purely on service.

In Matthew 5:16, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” Our service on the earth is how we shine the light that glorifies God for others to see His goodness.  Regardless of which step we are on at the five levels, we should always have a mindset of service: to treat our neighbor as we would treat ourselves. But when you are on the earlier steps, especially when you are concerned about time, resources and survival, it is difficult to operate holistically in a posture of service.

Also, in a culture dominated by achievement over service, it is too easy to get to the surplus step and think that your work is done because you are operating in abundance. To counter this tendency, I included the service step in the diagnostic assessment to reinforce that you are here for a God-given purpose, and are assigned by Him as a steward of your time, talent and treasure. 

If you identify that you, your organization and your clients or constituents have been on the surplus step for a while, your focus should be on how you can best serve your neighbor with the resources God has put in your hands.

So, once you have done your diagnostic assessment, how do you cultivate this service mindset to progress through all the steps and help those you lead to do the same? In basketball, a player who can dribble, pass and shoot is a valuable asset to their team—they are considered a “triple threat.” As a leader, become a triple threat by homing in on your purpose and helping others with theirs by cultivating vision, execution and completion.

Vision is critical to any lasting success. You need to see the future before it becomes the present and paint a vivid picture of where you want to go. Whether you have identified yourself as struggling doesn’t matter. Having a vision of what steady looks like is a powerful tool. Use your imagination to guide your progress.

Your plans are only helpful if you have developed your execution skills. You must execute with conviction and urgency to realize your vision. Maintain momentum by staying in execution mode no matter what obstacles arise. By building a culture of personal and organizational execution, you ensure you can stay in the center of your purpose, regardless of what happens around you.

What good is starting strong if you don’t finish? The world is littered with unfinished projects and unrealized dreams. Sometimes it makes sense to stop something that isn’t working, but completion should be one of your priorities for any plans you create.

In a 400-meter race, the turn around the bend for the last 100 meters is the most taxing on the athlete’s body because, at that point, everything in them is physically screaming to slow down. But it’s exactly then that they have to push through, if they want to complete the race. Often the last stages of any plans you make will be the hardest to execute, so don’t be surprised when you feel weary. Instead, tap into your vision again to get to the end.

Knowing where you are as a leader, and where your organization and its clients and constituents are in their growth, is the first step toward knowing where you’re going. By identifying your current step on the struggling, steady, solid, surplus and service staircase, you can pause, reflect and assess where you want to go. By focusing on the three dimensions of leadership—personal growth, business or organization growth and client or constituent development—you can create sustainable plans because they are rooted in the reality of your situation.

As you navigate the rollercoaster of life and embrace the characteristics of a triple-threat leader, you’ll have a lasting, positive impact on those around you. Through it all, strive for excellence in everything you do, whether visible to others or not, to honor your God-given purpose to shine a light around you in the world. This unwavering commitment to greatness in His eyes will set you apart and pave the way for lasting success.